Image Project: Blog Post 3

blog post 3, read and/or watch some tutorial on the image editing software you selected; play with the software a bit; reflect on what you learned and how you learned it.

The image editing site Picnik seems to be slightly different from other offline photo editing tools in several ways. It’s social media integrated, so you can easily share your images to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and other sites. The functionality is limited and made to be user friendly, whereas other more professional tools like Photoshop are made to have thousands of functions at the expense of user-friendliness.

The site offers a “Picnik Tour,” which basically outlines its main selling points and features. The only reason I read through the tour was because this assignment asked me to, which I think is a statement of the way my generation uses technologies. I wanted to just dive right in, figuring it out as I go, and only took the time to read the overview/instructions because I was asked to. My mom thinks I’m an IT wizard because I can fix any of her computer issues by clicking around until I find the answer (or by googling it, if it’s slightly more complicated), rather than reading a manual or taking a class on it.

The tool offers functions that are targeted toward a more casual user, so they’re much easier to use. Of course, they have the basic options: You can crop, rotate, adjust brightness and contrast, and resize. Then there are a few more targeted options, like teeth whitening, blemish removal, and airbrushing for imperfect skin. They know that people will be using this service to edit photos of themselves for Facebook, so they’re providing options specific to that avenue. It’s a freemium service though, so some of those features require a premium membership.

I think I’ll probably be using it mostly for the basic options on this project, but it’s nice to know I have the option to use the others.

EDIT: I received an email from Picnik informing me that the site will be closing April 12th, and the services will no longer be available. This isn’t bad news, because I’ll be finished with the project by then anyway, and all the once-premium services are now free to use! I’ll be able to explore the capabilities of the tool further this way, and I don’t feel that learning the tool will have been wasted, since it follows a fairly easy-to-use format in the first place.